Conservatives suck

Paul Waldman at TomPain.commonsense posted a clear-minded critique of conservativism on his website the other day, from which I quote:

"Conservatives supported slavery, conservatives opposed women'’s suffrage, conservatives supported Jim Crow, conservatives opposed the 40-hour work week and the abolishment of child labor, and conservatives supported McCarthyism. In short, all the major advancements of freedom and justice in our history were pushed by liberals and opposed by conservatives, no matter the party they inhabited at the time."

In his article, It's The Conservatism, Stupid, Walden elaborates on why conservatives suck in three bullet points. It's definitely worth a read.

1. Conservatism has failed.
2. Conservatism is the ideology of the past, a past we don'’t want to return to.
3. Conservatives are cowards, and they hope you are, too.

Thanks to Jodi at I cite for the link to Walden's article. I couldn't agree more. For all the chest pounding about how decisive they are, it's clear that conservatives have no spine. How can they? Their minds are closed to facts. They do not think for themselves, they believe what they are told to believe. They do what they are told, when they are told, the way they are told to do it. They are ready and willing at all times to sacrifice everybody else for the advancement of the conservative agenda. They ignore even the most blatantly criminal actions of their leaders because they are gray men and clone-like womem lapping up the "trickle down", clinging to a corrupt hierarchy chiggers on a dying dog.

Sunday at the Roxy - cartoon shorts

Here's a few animation videos for your Sunday entertainment. They are from a Canadian site that has a large archive, going back many years. I watched several and have to say I found them a bit on the grim side. Maybe it's the effect of the long, dark winters. Anyway, they're interesting and well done.

The Cat Came Back 1988 - 7 min 37 s

The Owl Who Married a Goose: An Eskimo Legend
1974 - 7 min 38 sec

Night Angel 1986 - 18 min 41 s

Morning in new world

It's 3am and I just woke up thinking about global warming, about how we continue to debate and deny it and how trivial this debate is. The planet's climate is changing as we speak. World wide, global climate change. It effects every aspect of life as we know it. We could have avoided global warming if we started making changes years ago. Patterns this massive, this complex develop slowly but there is a tipping point for all change and scientists say we're past it now. A new global weather cycle has already begun. Noticed? It will replace the old one, the one we evolved with, rose to dominance in and eventually unbalanced with our smoke and gasses, our destruction of carbon dioxide-eating, oxygen-producing trees, with our daily breeding of billions of methane-producing animals for slaughter, with our sprawling, worldwide mile after mile of concrete high rise, heat producing cities, we are past the point of no return. I'm afraid it will be interesting. Change one. Change all.

I don't think I'm being a doom bird about it. I guess I woke up with global warming on my mind because of a conversation I had with the Charter guy yesterday afternoon. After he (hopefully) fixed the problem we've been having with our internet connection he came to my office and we chatted for awhile. I think he was curious about what I was up to. My office is, well, colorful I guess you could say, especially as the rest of the house is practically empty, nothing on the the walls, no book shelves, no TV, no mementos scattered everywhere, no treasures on display. White walls, white rugs, and emptiness. We call it our zen house, then there's my room, with a tiny puppet theatre built into one of the book shelves in my "shipping department" amid a general overflow of rocks, shells, trilobites, feathers, piles of papers, boxes of zines, briefcases, my Chaitanya deities and world alter, including a hand-carved coyote some old guy I met in the desert gave me and a fabulous, fiddling frog. You get the idea. My little world. It's a big contrast to the sense deprivation in the rest of house. Anyway, we talked about global warming. I started it naturally. I guess it's been in the back of my mind ever since.

At the moment, five little fruit fly guys have made themselves at home on my monitor. One is crawling off to the right and another one is standing on the third word in the second to the last sentence of the last paragraph. On my monitor the word is "naturally". I don't know what it is for you. It all depends on the size of your monitor, your browser, resolution, all that. Or was. They move quickly. And another fellow is rubbing his legs over the fourth word of the first sentence of this paragraph. That should be "five" for everyone as it's at the beginning of the paragraph rather than the end. They are having quite a time of it but I'm going have to close their little light field down now and see of I can get back to sleep. Ta.

Jimi, the Rockridge Institute, and the rest of my day

Mr. Lee drove to Soda Springs Idaho today to pick up an off-road trailer he bought on Ebay. He'll be back Sunday evening. All in all he'll drive over 1200 miles in about a day and a half. I didn't go because it would be too tough, my knee being in this shape. I slept until after noon, healing takes a lot of energy, then worked on the driftwork website. Unfortunately I was working on a wide screen and checking it now on the laptop, I see it isn't quite right. Later. I'm done for the day.

So no matinee, maybe tomorrow, but here's a sound clip you might enjoy. I'm listening to it at the moment and find it pretty interesting. It's a raw mix of comments, often from concerts, by Jimmy Hendrix.

And from the Rockridge Institute, a very sobering look at the accomplishments made by the Bush administration. Their point is that actually Bush is not an incompetent boob. In fact, his administration has done a lot to advance the conservative agenda. The problems we complain about are not because Bush is an idiot. It is because the conservative philosophy is so terribly flawed and designed to benefit only the wealthiest. Here's an example of the changes the conservatives have ushered in. It's chilling.

The idea that Bush is incompetent is a curious one. Consider the following (incomplete) list of major initiatives the Bush administration, with a loyal conservative Congress, has accomplished:

* Centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree
* Starting two major wars, one started with questionable intelligence and in a manner with which the military disagreed
* Placing on the Supreme Court two far-right justices, and stacking the lower federal courts with many more
* Cutting taxes during wartime, an unprecedented event
* Passing a number of controversial bills such as the PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Drug bill, the Bankruptcy bill and a number of massive tax cuts
* Rolling back and refusing to enforce a host of basic regulatory protections
* Appointing industry officials to oversee regulatory agencies
* Establishing a greater role for religion through faith-based initiatives
* Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment — “The Healthy Forests Act” and the “Clear Skies Initiative” — to deforest public lands, and put more pollution in our skies
* Winning re-election and solidifying his party’s grip on Congress

These aren’t signs of incompetence. As should be painfully clear, the Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.

It’s not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it’s the conservative agenda.

More at the Rockridge Institute.

Driftwork and Lucky Pierre update

I got the contributor issues of Driftwork off in the mail today. I forgot to mention to them that they can get extra copies at cost. I was over focused, I guess. I get like that a lot. I also finally filled an order made by the Special Collections Library at the University of Wisconsin. They wanted another copy of Reddog Review #5. They ordered it before I had the knee surgery but I didn't get around to sending it until now. It was out of print so I had to make more copies. Plus Driftwork had be finished. Susan wanted to take it to a writer's conference this weekend. First things first.

I still haven't had a chance to get to my PO box. Unless something went terribly wrong, Lucky Pierre is there waiting for me. Roy of  "Why I Blog" found him under his house, a once proud little fellow fallen on hard times, gigging as a Santa doll. Roy kindly mailed him to me and when he arrives, Lucky Pierre not Roy, I will clean him up and he can join my puppet theatre. There's hope for everyone.

Replay

I gotta bitch. I'm sick at heart now that it's clear Special Investigator Patrick Fitzgerald has let Cheney, Rove and Bush skate after exposing Valerie Plame. Un-fucking-believable. No consequences. Nada. I’d say this makes it official. Our Republican "leaders" are completely ABOVE THE LAW. They can commit treason, lie us into war, rig and steal our elections, cheat, take and make bribes, spy on us, torture us, etc, etc, etc. No one will stand up to them or for us. We know how far the Right got in Germany. Now, with the new name, "neoconservative" and new look, "ownership society", they're really cleaning up. Americans are standing in the slaughterhouse line but are too stupid or too busy to notice or care. Old story. Makes me sick.